


If We Ever Disagree

by Kirrifish



Category: Fire Emblem: Soen no Kiseki/Akatsuki no Megami | Fire Emblem Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn
Genre: Character Study, Flashbacks, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, One Shot, Shinon is a Troll, Unresolved anger, ongoing recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:41:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22647322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kirrifish/pseuds/Kirrifish
Summary: His mother never hugged him. Shinon remembers longing for the attention, and then learning to keep quiet when he discovered it would never come.
Kudos: 13





	If We Ever Disagree

**Author's Note:**

> Based on an actual toast I was flattered to have taken part in.

His mother never hugged him. Shinon remembers longing for the attention, and then learning to keep quiet when he discovered it would never come. Her eyes passed over him from behind a film, her lips thin, like she'd cast her fishing line for a marlin and landed a flounder instead.

With his father it wasn't neglect. It was hatred. Shinon saw the way he disapproved of him, the son he never wanted, the son that never was. In an instant he blinks and sees the blood running down his hands, rubbed raw from the coarseness of the bowstring, staining red the feathers on the arrows that shake with his trembling spirit. Over time he learns to hold the bow steady, his wavering extremities giving way to a hardness that makes the arrows cut through the air unapologetically, and it is around this time that he learns to do the same with his words.

He sees the cracked walls in his room, the monochrome gray of the floor, and hears the shouting of his father reverberating, the silence of his mother. Day in and day out strangers fill his home, clutching spools of gold, and the tottering shanty he calls home always smells when they leave. During those times, his father locks him in the attic and he ponders the meaning of his existence. Is he to endure this suffering all his life?

He leaves home as an adolescent, a boy with nothing to his name but a shoddy bow that he'd hewn with a pocket knife, and he's sure nobody misses him.

Sometimes he sees it in his student's eyes, the dejection, the disappointment. The sense of being unloved. It is the look he gives him the day they meet on the battlefield, in the snow of Daein's goddess-forsaken fields. Rolf pleads with him, asking him to return. It is a stupid idea, a childish beckoning from someone he has forgotten is still a child, because when he stands it is with the conviction of a man, and the way he draws his bow is the exact way Shinon does it. All of that crumbles in an instant, though, and Shinon finds himself getting angry at his former pupil's tears. Because when people leave, they don't intend on coming back.

* * *

He doesn't trust humanity because his parents never trusted him. He doesn't trust the roof that didn't shelter him from the storm, the vat of soup that didn't share when his bowl was empty. For a while he sought the love he never received, before he realized he was crippled. Unable to open up to others, his psyche was sour and the taste in his mouth sourer, the taste of mistrust and betrayal and misanthropy. Every human being was another to backstab, to betray, to cast aside when their value to him had depleted. In the warm acceptance of Greil and his family, Shinon realized he was incapable of love. He knew what they had was something special, and he supposed he would call them "friends", but that was never exactly what he meant.

If he didn't have such an aversion to the resident strategist, he might have acknowledged that maybe the two of them had something in common — a bad past and a misanthropic disposition to answer. But to him Soren was deliberately mean-spirited, pretentious, cold in words and even colder in heart. Shinon found him impossible to speak to without losing his grip on his temper in a matter of words.

"A bottomless pit. Snowflakes that melt in your hands. Something you may want, but will never have." That was what a family was. According to Soren. The little mage closed his book with a snap and pushed in his chair, his black hair flowing in his rush to leave. Then Shinon needn't have wasted his breath. In a sudden flash of anger he seized an arrow off the closest table and hurled it at the wall, where it lodged in the wood so violently the shelves trembled.

"Family". A word Shinon detested because to him it meant a living hell. But he looked up to Greil like none other, the man who was the father he never had. And as the years went on and his snotty-nosed son grew into a snotty-nosed teenager, Shinon came to appreciate the word. "Family". From it germinated a bud of substance, and when someone — usually Greil — said it in the right context, he felt the ice around his heart melt a little, and it became a little easier to breathe. He even let himself experiment with defining the word.

"It means a group of people you stick with," he told Gatrie one evening as they sat at the bar, eyeing the long-lashed waitresses and the skirts that barely covered their inner thighs. "A group of people you couldn't possibly live without. A group you stumble home to drunk when you haven't given a thought about them all night. Things happen and arguments start, but every time you bury the hatchet you understand these people better. You don't necessarily like them. They annoy you and you hate them, you leave, and then you end up coming back, with the biggest fucking remorse in your heart. And they accept you. That is a family."

* * *

He finds himself eating these very words as the snot-nosed brat of the father he never had crushes him into the snow, the blackness inside him becoming a brilliant crimson upon the glacial whiteness, and a curd-like thickness fills his mouth. Because Greil always told them dying was the worst thing one could do to his family, and they'd barely set foot into beast country when he went and died like a dog, like a fucking stranger, without a word to any of them. And if he expected Shinon to follow his ignorant disgrace of a son after he went back on his own word, he was thinking too little of him. Shinon saw nothing but red when he walked away from the company that night, certain he would never forge bonds again. A man who couldn't live up to the words he spoke was no man at all. He wished with all the fibers in his body that he'd never met Greil at all, never accepted his offer to join the company, never imparted his archery prowess to protect the people he thought he cared about.

He wishes the brat would raise his arm and cut the life from his body, but instead he sheathes his sword and presents Shinon with an offer.

The mercenary company has billowed into something resembling an army since his time in its employ, and it is filled with faces he doesn't know or care to learn. Not a day passes without some nitwit stopping him to ask for his name and identification, but he doesn't need to give it much thought to know that for the first time in months, the weight on his spirit has eased and his heart doesn't race so irregularly.

He is reluctant to admit it to anyone, least of all himself. He knows the compassion the Greil Mercenaries show him is mountains more than he deserves, their reservoirs of forgiveness more suitable for a vessel deeper than his. But he stops to think that day. He stops to consider what twisted pathway his life would have converged toward without these people. Where his feet would have taken him if he had turned down Ike's offer, and how much time would slip past before the remorse drove him into the earth.

It is the first time the Greil Mercenaries are sharing a late-night meal together ever since they were driven from their keep by the ebony soldiers. The falling snow outside makes it feel as though years have passed, and certainly the idyllic times have faded into nothing more than a happy memory. But this moment is real, and it feels good in its own way.

Shinon lifts his glass during a lull in the conversation, and everybody's eyes follow. He quips something about having a few words to say, and beckons the others to raise their glasses as he begins his toast:

"Here's to you

and here's to me..."

The company is astounded by his choice of words and repeats them in softer tones, as if afraid that speaking loudly will revert him to his usual self.

"Friends for life

we'll ever be"

Oscar's brows are knitted, and Shinon guesses he thinks he's drunk.

"But if we ever

disagree"

The look on Titania's face tells him she knows exactly what's coming, and she's right.

"Then fuck you..."

Mia's eyes dance like the bubbles in his liquor and he looks away. Her expression is perfect. He's afraid he'll accidentally laugh, and then everything will be blown.

"Here's to me."

Shinon still hates that snot-nosed brat who runs the company under his father's name, but he knows Ike knows he wants to stay. That he'd found his place with Greil, lost his footing, and found it again. That he wouldn't have returned if it wasn't what he wanted. That he wouldn't have stayed until now. He isn't the kind of man who would ever do something just because someone asked him to. Unapologetic. Callous. Uncompromising. Arrows don't change trajectory after they leave the bowstring. They merely shift when the wind presses upon them.

Boyd looks like he's swallowed a bitter root, and Rhys is chewing his lip, but it's a testament to how much his colleagues understand him when surprise traverses none of their faces.

He smiles as he brings the glass to his lips, tilting the wine down his throat.


End file.
